Abstract
True empathy is not a total understanding of the other, the gait of one in the satisfied knowledge of a walk in the otherâs shoes, but an encounter with empathyâs own limits, the impossibility of access to the otherâs experiences and histories, an act of hesitation at the edge of an irreducible abyssal distance. What David Martin-Jones does in his bold and brilliant Cinema Against Doublethink is to extend this Levinasian insight to a perspective on world history and the lost pasts of the Global South. By analysing films where âcinematic depictions of the past are aesthetically structured like ethical encounters with othersâ (2), Martin-Jones diagnoses and exposes a trend in world cinema (what he calls a âworld of cinemasâ) to decentre Eurocentric and colonialist historical narratives through forcing an encounter with histories that do not fit the singular narrative decreed by colonial modernity. This is framed by Martin-Jones through the Orwellian notion of doublethink as the spinning of a political narrative of the past at odds with the facts.
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